Boone burned after deploying pen by book
TORONTO — For a team with a great bullpen, the Yankees so far have one lousy bullpen. Aaron Boone noted it has been just four games and that small samples are magnified this time of year because all that is available are small samples. He promised that over the full season the relief corps would be “not just a strength but an overwhelming strength.”
For now, though, it is making the new manager look bad. He was burned asking Dellin Betances to go a second inning Saturday. And Sunday, he made the kind of bythe-numbers decision that turned his predecessor, Joe Girardi, into a caricature of a binder with legs. The extended history screamed Boone should order Josh Donaldson walked to load the bases with two outs in the eighth and have David Robertson try to protect a one-run lead against Justin Smoak. The short history — not so much. Donaldson did not look like his ferocious self in this fourgame series and certainly was inferior to Smoak, who had homered in his previous at-bat against Tommy Kahnle to draw the Blue Jays within 4-3. Boone said, as a manager, he does not want to be a victim of recency bias and that a large pool of information will almost always outweigh the small for him. But this is all supposed to be beside the point. Boone was believed to have one good option after another to summon from his pen to make any decision look ingenious. Instead, he presently has one good option — Chad Green then a bunch of relievers so far socked black and blue. After Smoak clobbered a grand slam off Robertson to create what would be the 7-4 final, the bullpen was responsible for 11 of the 15 runs scored against the Yankees this year. Remove three dominant innings of relief by Green — including two Sunday — and the rest of the pen has yielded four homers in 40 at-bats and pitched to a 9.90 ERA. In fact, neither area of power that made leaving the broadcast booth for this job so attractive to Boone has yet really manifested. Giancarlo Stanton homered twice in the opener but was mainly shut off thereafter, and Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez never really got started.
The Yanks had one oasis of offense Sunday, a four-batter fourrun span in the third against Marcus Stroman: Stanton walk, Didi Gregorius RBI double, Neil Walker RBI single and Brandon Drury two-run homer (Drury was the Yanks’ best hitter at Rogers Centre). The Yanks managed just two other hits and no other runs as the Blue Jays’ hardly regaled pen — especially by comparison — did fantastically with Danny Barnes, John Axford, Tyler Clippard and Seung-Hwan Oh teaming for four innings of goose eggs.
And while holding Toronto to one run, Sonny Gray was so uneconomical and bedeviled by base runners that he was pulled after four-plus innings. That began the domino fall to disaster. Green delivered his two lockdown innings. But Kahnle went walk-homer to open the seventh.
Robertson put runners on second and third with one out in the eighth and actually got Devon Travis to chop to the mound for the second out. Robertson looked to the dugout and concurred with Boone to walk Donaldson here because the 2015 AL MVP was 3-for-8 lifetime with two homers versus Robertson. Smoak was 0-for-5 with four strikeouts.
But again, what do you want to take from history? In that MVP campaign, Donaldson homered in his only two at-bats against Robertson and otherwise was 1-for-6 in his career and hardly looked the MVP in this opening series. It also left no open base to work carefully to Smoak.
The reason Robertson had dominated Smoak (fanning him in all three at-bats last year) was his terrific curveball, but Smoak fouled one off at 2-2, did not fish for one in the dirt to move the count full, then fouled off two more that Robertson thought were the best he could throw. Robertson did not feel he could go back to the pitch a fifth straight time and, instead, tried to sneak a 93-mph fastball by the switch hitter.
“I was one pitch away and I didn’t get it done,” Robertson said.
Nope. The fastball was Smoak-ed. Robertson had yielded his first grand slam since 2010. And after the glee of opening the season and Boone’s tenure 2-0, the Yanks return for their 116th home opener having penned a terrible conclusion to their first series of the year.